Once Upon a Ferris Wheel
by signelchan
Summary: There are many different ways people react to the gentle shaking of a ride meant for overlooking the surrounding area. Screaming for their lives? Deciding to have a show of dominance? Check and check. [Modern AU.]


The carnival came into town for one week each fall, and without fail it was something that Chrom and Lissa had been going to since he was first old enough to take her to it without any adult supervision. Every year they went, to not just ride their favorites of the selection of rides, but to play the midway games, to watch all the strange people that were attracted to the bright lights like bugs, and to have generally fun sibling bonding times.

Once they were older, and both fell hopelessly headfirst into romantic pursuits, that didn't put an end to their bonding through their time at the carnival. It just meant that there would be other people present for the evening. At first it was just Chrom bringing his girlfriend Robin along, which made Lissa feel a little left out (and very much like an unnecessary third wheel), so she found some friend who would tag along to keep her company. But once she too had someone to bring out for a date, then it was two siblings going on a double date, no extra people needed. That didn't mean that extras didn't tag along, but it did mean that if they did, it wasn't the fault of either of the siblings that they weren't with a partner.

The year that Chrom and Robin got married happened to be the very same year that the carnival changed. Rather than the one that had been coming every year in recent memory, it was a smaller one, with less to do and even less reason to go to it. Tradition was still a thing to be followed, even if it wasn't the same carnival that had been the one they had been going to, and, truthfully, the whole thing had been less about the rides and games and had instead become more about a brother and sister getting to know the other one's significant other a bit better.

That was what made the new carnival ultimately better than the old, because the old carnival had only had rides that were meant for two people, and the new one seemed to have been more focused on family fun. The crown jewel of the new carnival's ride collection was a towering ferris wheel, sitting in the middle of the field that was otherwise covered in tents and small rides. "Huh, never been on one of these before," Chrom said, as the group that had congregated around him, Lissa, and their other halves approached the ride. "Maybe we should do it. Would be something fun, and it looks like the seats all fit four people apiece."

"I'm totally down for that!" Lissa cheered in response, punching a fist into the air. "I bet once we're up at the top, we'll be high enough to see the entire city! That's got to be so romantic!" Lowering her hand back down, she looked to her date, who was eagerly staring up at the big wheel with a grin on his face. "What do you say, Vaike? Wanna go on that with me and Chrom and possibly Robin too?"

"Of course! Ol' Vaike knows better than to turn down the chance of a lifetime to see the skyline with the girl of his dreams." His grin only got bigger and she squealed, grabbing him tightly in a hug and thanking him over and over again for accepting her offer.

Smiling at his sister's happiness for a moment, Chrom then looked to Robin, who seemed a bit unnerved by the sight of the ride. "Let me guess, you want to sit this one out, don't you? I won't be too upset if I have to go on simply to chaperone Lissa, but I would love it if you came along with me, just so that we too could admire the city lights from above."

Tugging at one of her long ponytails, Robin seemed to be weighing her options before she answered Chrom. "I guess it wouldn't be too bad if I went on there with you. Doesn't seem like there's any sort of warnings on this ride, anyway, and it looks like it would be gentle..."

"What is with you and the 'warnings' tonight? You've never been so weird about that before. Is it because this place changed? You worried they're behind on their inspections?" Chrom, nudging Robin in the side a bit, didn't seem to catch her almost death glare that she shot him, mostly because he was too busy mentally moving on to the next matter at hand. "Okay, well, everyone else can kind of do what they want, but I know what _we're_ all going to be doing for the next little while."

As it turned out, no one else really had any desire to ride a ferris wheel, so it ended up just being the four of them getting on and riding it together. Sure, they did have a couple people standing down on the ground watching for them, but the people in the seats around theirs were all strangers. Did it mean that they weren't going to get distracted by talking to friends in nearby seats? It sure did. But it also meant that, for the duration of the ride, the only anything they'd be doing would be talking to each other or looking out onto the city around them, and that would have gotten awfully boring if that's really what happened.

But things were never meant to go according to plan, not when the ride started moving and, much to the surprise of everyone, the little car they were in started swaying. "I wasn't aware this was a thing that happened, and I don't think I like this very much!" Gripping onto the side of the car with one hand and onto Vaike's arm with the other, Lissa looked almost terrified to be on the ride. "I just thought we went up and around, not all shaky like this!"

"Calm down, it's just a little bit of movement. You've been on much worse." Chrom watched as his sister did indeed seem to calm down a bit, loosening her grip on her boyfriend's arm, although she still held tightly to the side of the car. "Besides, we aren't even moving around too much at all. Kind of nice on a night like tonight, to slowly ride up into the sky." He looked to check on Robin sitting next to him, and saw her holding her head in her hands. "Oh, don't tell me, you're regretting coming on too, aren't you?"

"Not regretting anything right now, thank goodness. Just really hoping that what shaking that's happening now is the extent of it. If it gets any worse I…don't honestly like to think about what would happen." She lifted her head a bit to give a small smile at Chrom, her face noticeably pale even in the dim lighting they had up where they now were. "But everything's good, I promise. I'm fine." He took her smile as being sincere and leaned over to kiss her.

But right as their lips made contact, Vaike decided that he was going to startle everyone a little bit and shook the entire car for a few seconds, causing all hell to break loose. While he was certainly having fun with what he was doing, it was the opposite of fun for everyone else: Lissa was screaming like she was about to be murdered, holding onto the side with both hands as tightly as she could; Chrom, who was seriously just starting to get to kiss on his wife, was taken by surprise at the sudden violent movements and jerked away, trying to find out what was going on; and then there was Robin, who had been quite all right with being kissed, but once the shaking started she had to bring her head back down into her hands, muttering something while she did.

"What was that for, you big meanie jerk!" Collecting herself enough to stop screaming, even though they were all still shaking more than they had been before, Lissa took to giving Vaike a few soft punches in the arm. "You know I don't like that! That was so not cool!"

"Hey, sorry, but if there was one thing the Vaike didn't sign up for seeing while up here, it was your brother getting his kiss on." He raised his hands in a defensive motion, laughing as he did. She stopped punching at him, and he scooted a bit closer to her. "Now, hm, why don't you let me make it up t'ya somehow? Like maybe through a kiss of our own…?" She giggled and accepted his offer, but never once did it cross their minds that maybe, just maybe, some sort of payback for what had just happened would be taken out on them.

And that's exactly what happened. Chrom, now having to watch his sister being kissed, decided that he was going to shake the car a bit to get them to stop, but his definition of "a bit" was clearly flawed, because he initially caused it to jolt a lot harder than Vaike had before. The results of that were much different, because instead of just screaming like she had before, Lissa nearly jumped out of her seat, finding herself clinging to Vaike for dear life, and he was now glaring over at Chrom for such payback. Then there was Robin's reaction, which was to not only give a scream of shock, but to cover her mouth with both her hands and look over the side, seemingly unable to even look at anyone who was causing such trouble.

"Oh, so you wanna start a war, huh?" Vaike said, narrowing his glare a bit further, although the seriousness was diminished by the fact that he was still grinning. "Don't tempt the Vaike. He'll rock these seats all night if you want." Chrom's response was to shake the car again, setting Lissa off screaming even louder, and while she was attracting the attention of the riders around them, her volume wasn't enough to keep her boyfriend from making things even worse.

Without seeming to put much effort into it, he had their little car rocking back and forth much faster than it should have been. And when he'd stop, then Chrom would do the honors of adding to the shaking. Back and forth they went, only caring about the other person's reaction and if they wanted things to stop. By the time they had reached the apex of their ride and were going back down, the car was in a constant state of swinging wildly back and forth, neither of them wanting to back down from the challenge. At that point, Lissa was virtually sitting in Vaike's lap, screaming and begging for him to stop the shaking, tears streaming down her face like she thought she was going to die.

And then, just like before, there was Robin, sitting in complete silence with her eyes shut tightly, her face turned away from everyone else, and her hands firmly covering her mouth. It was hard to tell if she was simply ignoring what was going on, or if she was restraining herself in some way, but no one had the time or desire to really notice what was going on with her. She wasn't participating, and she wasn't losing her mind, so to the others she just didn't matter.

That was, until the rocking and shaking got so bad that she turned to face everyone in the car with her, and she dropped her hands from her mouth to clutching her stomach. The almost haunting groan she gave as she opened her eyes and looked positively miserable was enough to cease all attempts at continuing the "war" that had broken out—proof that a woman looking like she was about to get sick was a more effective way to stop two guys from being immature than someone screaming was.

For the rest of the ride, they sat in almost silence, letting the car stop shaking before letting it remain in its neutral, slightly moving state. As soon as their time on the ride was complete, and they were getting off, the first thing any of them noticed was the group waiting for them at the exit, everyone wide-eyed in horror. "Er, what's going on? Did you all hear Lissa's screaming from up there?" Chrom, paying no attention to the fact that his wife was swaying where she stood, was focused solely on getting an answer out of someone who had been watching them.

And an answer he did get. "Why, yes, we all did hear that, and those of us waiting down here the whole time had quite a laugh about it, but then…" The one who had chosen to answer, little mouthy Maribelle, pointed past Chrom to Robin, which caused him to turn to look and see her almost falling over with how much she was moving side-to-side. As he went to her side to support her, Maribelle kept talking. "It was positively disgusting. Oh, I feel bad for anyone who was underneath it. We couldn't keep laughing at dear Lissa's expense when poor Robin was throwing up from whatever you lot were doing to her!"

"Oh my god, you were throwing up on the ride?" For asking such a stupid question, Chrom got a wavering fist straight to his side, causing him to recoil a bit. "Right, right, should have paid attention to you and not to topping what Vaike could do in terms of shaking the ride car. Couldn't you have said something, like that you didn't feel good?"

She leaned into him, rolling her eyes as she did. "Yes, because when your pregnant wife only agrees to come on the ride because it looks gentle, and then she says that the natural movement was more than enough shaking, that means you can totally have a fight over which one of you can shake the car more and I'll be perfectly fine." She sighed, still clutching her stomach. "I couldn't handle the shaking. At all. And I probably ruined all sorts of people's nights because of it."

By saying that, she hadn't expected that to become the end of the trip to the carnival. She had figured that everyone else would continue on with the rides and the games, but instead, citing the best intentions for her, the group disbanded for the night, and almost everyone went home.

Maybe not to the proper home, but they went home.

* * *

 _eighteen years later_

As it did every year, the carnival popped up in its usual place, for that single week in the fall, and just like always, people flocked to it just to see if it had changed from its previous incarnation. Over the years the rides had been replaced with newer, safer versions of themselves, taking away some of the nostalgia for the older crowd, but also keeping them from worrying too terribly much that some horrible fate would befall their children if they chose to ride anything. The only exception, it seemed, to this updating rule was the old ferris wheel, which came to find its spot in the middle of the sea of tents each and every fall. It seemed as unstable as ever, creaking along as it dutifully made its rotations, and most people elected to stay far away from it because it seemed like an accident waiting to happen.

Every year when she came to the carnival with her parents, Lucina had been told explicitly to never once go on the ferris wheel, but whenever she asked why she shouldn't everyone fell silent. She really didn't have any interest in riding it, not when she learned that it had been at this carnival longer than she'd been alive, but she still would have liked to have known why everyone seemed to be hiding some dark secret or something whenever talk of it was brought up. But this year she was finally old enough to go to the carnival without her parents around, and while she still wasn't feeling like riding it, she at least could if she changed her mind.

Although changing her mind about that was not the thing she was thinking of as she and her group of friends made their way up to the ticket counter to gain admission to the carnival. The man sitting in the stuffy little booth took one look at the gaggle of teenagers and shook his head, pointing to the sign that read: _No guests under age 17 without chaperone over age 17_. Seeing the sign made Lucina's eyes light up, because she was the "chaperone" of the group, she was the reason that everyone was going to be allowed in—and her boisterous cousin pushed his way up to the front, moving her out of the way, just so that he could hand over his driving permit that said that he too was seventeen, letting everyone have the ability to go inside for some fun.

As everyone paid for their tickets and went inside, Lucina still stood there, looking at the sign with some sort of animosity filling inside of her. She had wanted to come to the carnival with a couple of her friends for a night of hanging out, and somehow it had turned into her cousin also coming along on the very same night with his group of friends, and she hated it. She hated how ridiculous he was, and how obnoxious, and how he never seemed to understand that she didn't enjoy anything about him.

Her anger subsided when she felt a smaller hand grabbing hers, and she looked to see her younger brother Morgan looking up at her, a huge smile on his face. "C'mon, Lucy, if you don't buy us tickets, I think everyone else will do stuff without us. Even though I think they're gonna do that anyway."

"And if they do, me and you will just go off and ride whatever we want, just the two of us." She returned a smile to him, before approaching the counter, showing her own permit that had her age on it (a moment that _should have_ been one of pride, because she had been waiting for the moment she was seventeen and at the carnival for years), and buying all the tickets her and Morgan could ever need for the night. After they had everything, they went inside the gates, just to find that their group had stopped within ten feet of the entrance, all looking back and waiting for the two.

"Nice to see that you've decided to join us once more," she heard her cousin say in that overdramatic and grating voice of his, and she rolled her eyes, not even paying attention to the fact that he was standing on a bench as if he had been giving a speech or something. She soon found out that he had been doing exactly that. "Now, as the leader of the expedition through the carnival grounds, I say that we should start with something that, in all my years, I have never gotten to do. My comrades, I say we start with the giant wheel and make more decisions after that."

The overall consensus of the group was to follow his word, and although she had no intentions of getting on the ride Lucina figured it would look bad if she didn't go with. But by hanging back from everyone else, she was able to voice her problems to her brother without anyone overhearing her. "Morgan, I just don't get it. What's so cool about Owain? He's not even that interesting, and yet everyone wants to do what he says."

"Maybe it's because he's more fun?" Morgan offered as a response, before noticing his sister's almost-death glare. "Sorry, sorry, he's not really more fun, but he acts like it."

"Whatever it is, I'm not putting up with it tonight. It's our first time here without our parents around and I'm going to have a good time." Taking a few deep breaths to try and calm herself down, Lucina started walking a bit faster to catch up with the group, which had Morgan nearly running to keep pace with her. Once they rejoined everyone again, in front of the ferris wheel, she knew that things were going to start going terribly, terribly wrong. Why, just seeing Owain actually standing _in line_ for a ride that she knew he had been told to never ride was telling her that things were already bad. But to see him there with two of his friends and one of hers…she couldn't let whatever disaster that would cause actually happen. She had to stop it somehow.

"Somehow" wasn't supposed to involve her getting roped into being one of the passengers on the ride. What had happened was simple: she had gone up to one of his friends and asked him to leave the line (the conditions of said leaving were not ones she wanted to get into, but they involved him watching Morgan for a few minutes in exchange for something), then when Owain had gone to talk to his friend and saw his cousin standing there instead, fury in her eyes, he almost lost his own temper and started yelling at her. But the line started moving and, with them aggressively staring at each other, they completely neglected to notice that they were getting closer, and closer, and closer to the front of the line until they, and their friends ahead of them, were next to get on. By then, neither of them wanted to back down and stop the dramatics, and that meant getting on the ride and continuing their staredown on there.

Being stuck next to her cousin that she utterly despised on a ride that she never had wanted to go on was not how Lucina envisioned her night being spent, yet there it was, actively happening. Once the car started moving, shaking ever so slightly, she realized that this was not anything she even wanted to be part of, and she blinked, causing Owain to laugh. "Ha, looks like I win again. You shouldn't start staring like that if you have no intentions of trying to beat me."

"It wasn't supposed to be a competition. I wanted you out of the line. We aren't supposed to be on this!" The car rocking more than she liked to think about, she looked down at the ground as they started making their ascent. She could see Morgan waving up at her, surrounded not just with the person she had asked to watch him, but by two of her friends as well. They were all looking up at her, and she really hoped that they weren't saying anything like how she was going to die or something. Turning back to face Owain, she shuddered. "I hate you so much right now. Why did you think this was a good idea?"

"Truthfully, coming on this wasn't my idea. Inigo had suggested it and I felt like taking him up on that offer, and dueling to the death once we got to the top, sounded like a fun time. But now he's not here and yet we are. We," he repeated, before pointing to the people seated across from them, "and those two."

"Shut up, we aren't just 'those two,' you ignorant loser." Hearing someone who wasn't herself insult him was music to Lucina's ears, and she was thankful that there was at least one tolerable person up on the ride with her. Sure, it would have been nicer if it were any of her friends that weren't Severa, but she was still a good friend. "We're the entire reason that Inigo even had the idea to ride it. I told him it would be funny to watch him push you out when we got to the top, and you totally fell for it."

"I did not fall for anything! I knew that was the plan, and I agreed so that I could push him out instead." Owain laughed for a second, before looking over the edge to the ground below and audibly whimpering. "Wasn't aware this went up so high. N-not like that matters or anything. I'm not scared of heights…"

From across the car, a muffled voice responded with, "Keep lyin' to yourself about it then. We're up too high and I don't think I can do this." There were a few sniffles scattered throughout the two sentences, and it was painfully clear to everyone that Brady was definitely sitting there crying like he usually did. "We've gotta get off. Can't do this."

"We're not getting off until the ride's over!" Severa said, stomping down with one foot and causing the car to rock even more. Everyone screamed in response, the cousins grabbing each other in fear, and if he hadn't been crying already then Brady definitely was by then. "Oh, all three of you are a bit scared of some shaking, huh?" The twisted smile that found its home on Severa's face after realizing that she was riding a ride with three people not made for such a thing was a sign of even worse things to come.

She then proceeded to spend the entire ride shaking the car as hard as she could, freaking everyone else out more than they needed to be. Over half of the time she did it with a sobbing mess laying his head in her lap, what words that could be made out over the sounds of his crying along the lines of apologies for any and every bad thing he'd ever done. And while neither of them ever got to the point of crying, both Lucina and Owain definitely shouted out some apologies of their own, several of them aimed at each other.

When the ride ended and they were getting off, the group waiting for them was awash with laughter. But everyone stopped the giggles when they saw that the cousins that had always seemed to be in a constant battle of hatred were actually getting along, although a few chuckles escaped someone when they saw how…invigorated Severa seemed to be, compared to how shaky and sobbing Brady was.

Over the course of the night, several more groups from the large one went on the ferris wheel, but none of them could have claimed to have had such an interesting experience as the first one did. Not only did that ride remind everyone how much of a pansy someone in their midst was, but it taught everyone a lesson that would linger with them forever: when faced with death by a shaking ferris wheel car, people do different things in the time during and after. Unlike their parents before them who may have done some reckless or silly things, both Lucina and Owain learned that they could get along, regardless of all the things they had always hated about each other.

It wasn't until weeks later, after someone squealed to one of their parents about the two riding the thing, that they learned why they weren't supposed to go on it in the first place. Had they known beforehand that the ride that had somehow brought them closer was the very thing that had been the start to one of their biggest points of dissention, they quite possibly would have seen the change to their relationship coming. But the truth was unexpected and the healing powers of a violently shaking ride were unquestionably there.

They decided to brave their respective fears of the height and the shaking and make riding the ferris wheel a cousin bonding thing every year after that.

* * *

 **A/N: This was written as a request fill, and I couldn't decide if I wanted to write this with first generation or second generation characters, so why not both?**


End file.
